HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Overusing formatting may only be allowed on special occasions

2015 has been an exciting year for us all. Among other things we reached 1000 users, updated the website to https, introduced the mod in training and +developer ranks, celebrated our 2nd birthday and created a public Slack group!

Today is a good day. A few hours ago, Let's Encrypt went from closed beta to public beta, allowing us (and everyone else) to get a free SSL certificate.

That means you can now access redstoner.com via encrypted HTTPS instead of plain text HTTP!

Although Redstoner may not be the most intimate website, there are still many reasons why encryption is important, those include protecting your privacy and protecting you from hacking, censoring, or theft attacks. Did you know anyone can take over your website accounts via HTTP on a public WiFi? Of course, global surveillance is also a reason – either directly or indirectly. Anyway, you now log in (and browse) securely!

A+ Grade Security

Why am I logged out?

Sorry for that, I had to kick everyone out to make sure your insecure sessions are no longer valid. Otherwise there was a change your website account could still be taken over. That's not going to happen again, however.

Redirect to HTTPS

From now on, any attempts to connect to Redstoner via HTTP will be redirected to HTTPS, so you don't have to do anything.
We're also redirecting from subdomains (such as www.redstoner.com) to redstoner.com to keep things simple.

HSTS

We're also using HTTP Strict Transport Security so your browser will remember that redirection. It will automatically switch to HTTPS even before it tries to connect to Redstoner.com

OCSP stapling

Subresource Integrity

We're also making use of Subresource Integrity which protects you from a compromised CDN (a website that hosts some JavaScript code for us) by comparing a checksum specified by Redstoner.com with the actual checksum of the requested JavaScript file.

Partial encryption & Images

On some pages, your browser might warn you about 'Mixed Content'. It might be displayed as a lock with a warn icon:

It simply means redstoner.com is fully loaded via HTTPS but some images in the forum were loaded via HTTP.

That's something we can hardly fix, but you can help by embedding images with a https://imgur.com/… or https://puu.sh/… link.

Old devices

Please note that some really old devices or browsers might not be able to access the site anymore. They have serious security flaws and should not be used anymore. Upgrade your browser, if possible.

Other things worth mentioning

We hit 1500 users! \o/

And lastly, about a week ago I managed to find an old video I for some reason recorded and it just so happens at the date of posting this, its exactly one year oldnostalgia much ._.+1 to you if you see yourself in the video!

Due to recent problems involving people abusing illegal "Ban Potions", and then using free VPNs and free MC accounts to evade bans, we've decided that the only viable solution is to remove splash potion effects for any non-staff users. If you continue to have issues with the aforementioned abusers, please report them. Sorry for any inconvenience. Thanks.

Staff

Promotions!

@L0rdDrag0 is now full mod! \o/ And this time thats sadly all we got on the happy side of things...

The always sad goodbye

@bayes32, @MorganEarlJones, @Nyxis, @MathewST and @Codex_Creeper have all stepped down from the mod in training position, mainly for lack of time.

@Evanis_ and @MisaXage have retired from their long-time mod position, all I can say is they did a lot, and deserve a big thanks for helping the server get to where we are now! (@Evanis_ has also retired from his position as a developer)

In-game changes

Aliases

/π is a new alias for /p i//delete is now an alias for //set air for the worldedit people that wanted it ;)
and of course /colours is an alias for /einfo c for our British English speaking members c:
last but not least, our Linux users get /ls as an alias for /list

Plugins

SignalStrength

Simple enough, look at either a chest, dispenser/dropper, hopper or a furnace and type /signalstrength <number> or /ss <number> and a corresponding amount of items will be put into the inventory so that a comparator read-out will give you a redstone signal strength of the number you specified in the command!

Idea for this plugin comes from @Armadillo28.

ChatAlias

You can now set aliases for words that you say, for example adding allWorks -> ErrorsEverywhere will automatically replace every phrase allWorks that you send in chat with ErrorsEverywhere! Do /alias for more info!

ErrorsEverywhere... totally not hinting anything...

ImBusy

A handy plugin to notify others that you're busy doing something! /busy for more info.

Existing plugins that have changed a bit

Calc

It now ignores lower and upper case letters! Up until now you had to specifically give it 0xffff for it to convert the hexadecimal value into decimal, now 0xFFFF works and also 0xFfFf works :P

Warn

/warn and /warnp now supports permission systems, thus it will be removed from lower ranks than builder.

Tag and Punishments

Although this information is for staff members only, Tag now supports offline players and listing all punished players will print a list of usernames instead of UUIDs

Earlier today we encountered an issue with a corrupted chunk in the plot world, and as a consequence the server was down for an hour or so. The problem has been resolved and the server is now back up (yay!). Sorry for any inconvenience.